How Is Michelle Williams’s Glinda the Good Witch in Oz the Great and Powerful Different from Billie Burke’s Classic?

In Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful, Michelle Williams has clarified, she plays a younger version of Glinda the Good Witch, the character immortalized by Billie Burke in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. Seemingly relieved by the leeway that this age gap allowed, Williams told the Orlando Sentinel* *back in 2011, after being cast in the role, “So I don’t have to do a Billie Burke imitation. I’m playing a younger Glinda, so I’m not bound by Billie Burke’s performance. I don’t get to say, ‘Toto, too!’ Thank goodness!” In several recent interviews promoting the film, which premieres this weekend, the Oscar-nominated actress has gone into more detail about the lengths she took to inform her version of the benevolent Frank L. Baum character and find the psychological motivation behind her mythical persona.

Departing from Burke’s Glinda, Raimi and Williams decided that in Oz the Great and Powerful, the character should be more fallible. “Glinda can’t be omniscient because then she has no struggle,” Williams explained recently to the Los Angeles Times. “If she already knows everything about the situation, there’s nothing for her to discover.” To the Toronto Sun, she elaborated, “If she’s just good and pure, she’s easily dismissed as being unrelatable or not that interesting or, even worse, annoying. . . Her purity, her truthfulness, her goodness, those things are absolutes, but within those, what kind of flavours and variations can I find?"

TheLos Angeles Timesnotes that to prepare, Williams also kept a “Glinda notebook,” recording her observations about the witch’s “upright posture and precise way of holding her wand,” while reading nearly all of Baum’s Oz novels. In the books, Glinda the Good Witch is described as a young woman with rich, red hair (point, Burke) who wears a pure, white dress (point, Williams). In addition to being slightly younger, Williams’s Glinda had many modifications to her costume, which lost the sparkly, bubble-gum-colored prom-dress affect, eight feet in circumference in the skirt, and about 10 inches in crown. For one action sequence, Williams has said that she even managed to persuade Raimi to have a different costume made for her. In an interview with Collider, she explained:

“I remember that it became very clear to me that Glinda needed to change her dress to go into battle, and that she needed something that she could move more freely in and that could look like armor—after we had already shot something of me in my other dress, doing something in battle. I went to Sam [Raimi] and said, ‘It’s really important to me. I know what it should look like. Is there any way, please?’ And Sam is so accommodating that he said, ‘If it means that much to you, then it means that much to me,’ and we got to reshoot that with the new dress.”

While the new Glinda gets to take part in several dramatic scenes in Oz the Great and Powerful, Billie Burke’s role was limited to a string of cheery cameos, in which she offers reassuring words to Dorothy in her trademark lilting delivery. In keeping with Baum’s description of the character, and the psychological breakdown devised with Raimi, Williams opts for a more subdued, otherworldly take on the character. In the clips below, also note how, as Williams mentioned above, both Burke and Williams wave their wands with careful precision and travel via their Baum-scripted mode of Oz-ian transportation: bubbles in the sky. (It’s amazing the bubble-effect updates that 70+ years and a reported $325 million budget will afford you.)